the appendix quilt

June 27, 2014

Last year on November 4th I woke up with slight stomach pain. It wasn’t terrible but it was enough to be concerning. I did some googling, some Web MDing (verb?), some consulting of friends without their appendixes and I determined that I was indeed experiencing symptoms of appendicitis. I cabbed myself to the ER and had my appendix removed 8 hours later. Seemingly smooth and seamless. Not.

To make a long and sort of gross story short… as a complication of the surgery I developed an infection two weeks later and had to spend some time in the hospital and have a second procedure.

All this to say that for the month of November and early December I was pretty much out of commission. What’s a girl to do but sit at home and binge on television and sew a quilt?!

So I sewed a triangle quilt. Technically my third quilt and technically my second triangle quilt. I sewed a baby quilt for Miss Erica Greco Millay last year that I almost forgot about until I stumbled upon a photo. It’s so tiny… Next time I need to focus on making it a standard size. You can’t quite tell but the quilt below is a little guy.

Back to the appendix quilt though…. The idea for it started back in the early fall. The gray triangles with pink and green floral pattern were originally pajama pants. I saw the pants at Target and decided that I wanted to make a quilt with that pattern as the focus. I bought an extra large pair of pants to provide the most fabric and then picked the others ones to compliment it.

I knew I wanted to do a triangle quilt (instead of a patchwork square) this time after seeing this one by Elise. I used a rotary cutter and self healing mat to cut the triangles. I laid everything out and sewed rows of triangles and then joined the rows.

I’m mildly obsessed with the final product. I finished the quilt with an organic cotton middle layer and gray binding. It’s satisfactory to assemble the quilt and of course finish it but I sort of like the step of cutting all the pieces the best. Something about cutting the fabric and putting it together in the pattern the first time is very nice.